5/13 No place of weapon Raymond

6/13 Marcel

7/13 Jean-Marc

8/13 Bernard The Jura Constituent Assembly

9/13 June 18th

10/13 border

11/13 Vellerat Commune Libre

12/13 traces

13/13 trace of a near future

Zoé Aubry - Impact, in Search of (R)evolution

Feb 27, 2019

1815, Treaty of Vienna. The Jurassians attached to Bern revolt themselvesand fight to defend their independence, their French language, their cultural and religious rights. The emerging movements are irredentist and separatist.

1978. After many years of struggle and a number of votes, plebiscites and sub-plebiscites dividing the Jura territory, part of it accedes to the status of Swiss Canton. Last to enter the Helvetic Confederation, Jura becomes the 26th Federated State. For certain municipalities whichremaine attached to Bern, the question of their belonging is still pending.

Expatriate Jurassian, my dialectical approach of the independence struggle, which was subject of daily family debates until the death of my grandfather, is built in rhizome. Reclaiming this story through my medium is part of a research ofunderstanding and interpretation towards the process of my family’s convictions that led them to take part in the hostilities. This approach is based on a relationship between the history of a territory and collective experiences governed by individuals with their own identities.

Based on the autonomist movement’s archives, my research suggests correlations between physiognomies, expressions and bodily positions in relationship to their ideology.

Between icons and intimacies, a circular collective memory is constituted by the images relating to the protagonists’ emotional persistence.

Remains of this tumultuous past, iconographic traces scattered throughout the territory, are sometimes covered by the antagonists, constantly remembering the vigor of this fight.

A relationship between societal phenomenons and individual experiences

Mar 05, 2019 - Zoe Aubry

Based on anthropological investigations, my approach is based on a relationship between societal phenomenons and individual experiences. Human relationships and discoveries therefore govern the basis of my methodology. According to a dialectical approach built in rhizomes, the perpetual constitution of links within which any element can affect or influence any other is fundamental. Our temporality is essentially challenged.

In its thinking form, my work is freedom, worry, research, cohesion, connivance, moving from the singular to the universal, juggling between critical, poetic and political dimensions.

It is developed simultaneously under the mutual influence of different observations and conceptualizations. Exploring museums, documentation centers and archives belonging to private individuals, I gradually reconstruct historical imagery before reinterpreting it. This is followed by an investigation, collecting press clippings, interviewing both documents and living memories. These entities with whom I try to establish contact give me access to impermanence, transmitting memories whose dichotomy lies between insubstantiality and material. It is this space that I put in image, giving to see the constitution of a collective memory elaborated at the border between icons and intimacy.

My territorial investigation, thought according to cartographic principles gives rise to a geographical study in search of traces, which takes place in parallel.

Mostly in the field, my preferred device is in attention, between gaze, hearing and dialogue. Kit of flashes and tripods on the back, camera in hand, I watch for clues and flags on the side of hills, climbing vehicles and buildings as needed.

My hands free the camera in two situations: to knock on the doors of these strangers who, shortly afterwards, will become my interlocutors and models, either for the benefit of a second image sensor, the scanner.

When I set foot on land between two expeditions, my workspace takes place in an open space, which considerably encourages exchanges and constructive criticism.

A vision of knowledge through a fragments’ accumulation

Mar 04, 2019 - Zoe Aubry

I would talk with you about the image’s deconstruction and the gestures of opposition through “Impact, in Search of (R)evolution, Typological & aesthetic hypothesis”, establishing the surface of our faces as an interface between person and ideology, suggesting correlations between physiognomies, expressions and political convictions.

— A vision of knowledge through a fragments’ accumulation —

Alphonse Bertillon or Cesare Lombroso, during the early days of criminology (late 19th century), these gentlemen wanted to define the potential criminals by physical fragments through the comparative study of photographs.

Bertillon’s processes were put into practice in the courthouse as early as 1882, and since then all nations have sent students to this great school. The bertillonnage has been universally adopted despite the rarity of such a reputation for French discovery.

Lombroso concluded that deviance and crime are biological phenomena that can be distinguished into five types. The anatomical and physiological characteristics of the criminal therefore make it possible to differentiate him clearly.

Inventor of forensic identification, establishing the surface of our faces as an interface between the individual and society, Alphonse Bertillon and the delicate and contemporary reflection that can be made have guided me in the conception of my work as a hypothesis, an attempt of culturalist analysis, without wishing to essentialize my subjects.

The first part of the corpus « Impact, in Search of (R)evolution », « Typological & aesthetic hypothesis » is an aesthetic study of the Jura autonomist movement based on archival documents. It tries to establish the typical portrait of the emblematic Jurassien.

I examine the physical and social typologies of members of the autonomist movement, suggesting correlations between physiognomies and expressions related here to their ideology.

The essentials

Mar 03, 2019 - Zoe Aubry

Because she deals with crucial subjects, constituted little by little while involving the coexistence of several levels which present multiple entries, Laia Abril.

For the insight of the original connections between heterogeneous elements, the space for dialogue offered by the confrontations between two images, as well as the harshness of their questions, Broomberg and Chanarin.

For all the ways he has of suturing the wounds of our world and his political commitment, Kader Attia who, for the time of a definition, joins André Breton and Jean-Jacques Lebel to whom I owe the conception of an object endowed with choice and vision “we do not discover an object, it comes to us”.

For the ruptures he acknowledges and his critical spirit, Thomas Hirschhorn.

For he remarkably questions the boundary between absence and presence, Christian Boltanski and his conception of the photographic medium as presence, memory to the faculty of reviving the absent, as well as his perspective, and this without any words, of suffering and war.

For the complexity of his thinking in crossed networks constantly evolving, the orientation of his approach both conceptual and artistic, and his perseverance that I make my own in (en)quests and investigations, Marco Poloni.

References in the picture, from left to right, from top to bottom:

Laia Abril, Lobismuller

Adam Broomberg and Olivier Chanarin, War Primer 2

Thomas Hirschhorn, Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques

Laia Abril, On abortion — A Historiy of Misogyny — Chapter One

Christian Boltanski, Kaddish

Helen Zout, Disparition

Kader Attia, The repair — from occident to extra-occidental cultures

Timothy Prus, The Luton Auguries

Duane Michals, Chance Meeting

N. T. Salmon, Asservate Exhibits — Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Yad Vashem

Unknown Names

Mar 01, 2019 - Zoe Aubry

Because I have not been able to address women’s issues within my project « Impact, in Search of (R)evolution » yet because of the complexity of its political aspect and the time it covers, but because it is essential, I would like to introduce my work in progress « Unknown Names »

— Is female emancipation still deadly in 2018?

Behind a statistic (a woman dies every three days under the blows of her partner) which repeats itself every year, there are lives, first names, collateral victims. The extraction of these stories from various facts, coupled with their convergence, viscerally highlights the recurrence and the violence of a social fact, we are particularly involved in the questioning of its media coverage. To restore to these victims even an identity, some lines of existence, a situation, a history (although often lacunary), undoubtedly reveals that these dramas hurt any social class, any age ; and essentially pushes us to discern the extraordinary violence falling in the very heart of conjugal intimacy.

This funeral litany makes us aware of the magnitude of the phenomenon and its stakes. The eponymous book retraces all the feminicides that took place for the time being between January 1st and April 30th, 2018, on the French territory, mapped on the cover.

Suffering from atrocities similar to those caused to Sylvie, Catherine, Estelle, Aline and her twins, as well as two women with unknown names, these photographs result from a process of deterioration in abyme that is getting impair.

Tridimensionally remodulated, the representations of space reinvents themselves. Conscious of itself, the projective plane is then extracted from its two-dimensional characteristic. The image comes out of the frame, from the plane of representation instilling a whole that takes place outside the image; by its movement towards the spectator, it beckons to us and addresses our situation, demanding a responsibility from ourselves.

— This project will be exhibited at the MBAL — Locle Museum of Fine Arts, Switzerland from November 2019 — January 2020